$2.5 million awarded to transform knowledge and treatment of bipolar disorder

A $2.5 million grant for the transformation of knowledge and treatment of bipolar disorder has been awarded to researchers at UTHealth Houston by  Breakthrough Discoveries for Thriving with Bipolar Disorder (BD²).

Researchers leading the project are Jair Soares, MD, PhD, professor and chair and the Pat R. Rutherford, Jr. Chair in Psychiatry in the Louis A. Faillace, MD, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston; and Rodrigo Machado-Vieira, MD, PhD, professor of psychiatry and director of the Bipolar Disorder Program in the department.

“This is a landmark initiative that will bring together several prestigious institutions and some of the leading scientists working in this area,” said Soares, who is also the director of the Center of Excellence on Mood Disorders. “We are excited to be part of this important effort and hopeful that the development of key knowledge will help us move towards the goal of precision psychiatry.”

Affecting nearly 40 million people worldwide, bipolar disorder is a serious mental health condition with dramatic and often unpredictable shifts in mood, energy, activity, and cognition. The BD² Integrated Network longitudinal cohort brings together two key models of advancing medicine. The first is the systematic collection of data from a defined set of participants over time, known as a longitudinal cohort study.

The second is the development of a system to repeatedly improve care for patients, known as a learning health network. The BD² Integrated Network aims to bring scale, time, and depth to phenotyping a cohort of people living with bipolar disorder.

“The goal is to address how symptoms are presented in relation to biomarkers that could be helpful to define best treatments,” Machado-Vieira said. “So, if a patient is presenting some symptoms with some biological findings, we aim that those findings will help to identify what would be the best treatment for that patient in a naturalistic setting.”

Researchers and clinicians see this data as the key to understanding patient subtypes, trajectories, and developing targeted interventions that will transform patient experience. This initial focus on bipolar I disorder allows the initiative to identify relevant patterns faster because diagnostic validity is stronger leading to less variation in the participants.

“Based on the profile of the individuals identified, clinicians could partner with researchers to identify and test alternative treatment approaches that are aligned with their biological profile,” Machado-Vieira said.  “While these sub-studies are several years away, our infrastructure and network of providers make this vision uniquely possible and rapidly scalable.”

UTHealth Houston is one of the six regional centers in this initiative. Others are Harvard Medical School, The John Hopkins University School of Medicine, the University of Michigan Medical School, Mayo Clinic, and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. Researchers at UTHealth Houston will enroll up to 200 patients with bipolar disorder, who will be characterized through the collection of clinical, cognitive, imaging, and physiological markers over several years.